The nation we can’t afford?

At a time when many students still see college as their best hope for a rewarding career, higher education has become more expensive, far outpacing the steady increase in the cost of living.

As a consequence, average student debt at graduation is currently pushing $30,000.

But falling beyond the reach of these daunting statistics are many capable students who don’t accumulate student debt because they can’t scrape together the means to go to college in the first place.

Which raises a question: Wouldn’t our nation be better off if all American students were encouraged — even assisted — by public policy to push their intellectual capacities to their maximums?

What if all higher education in our country were extremely affordable? Or even free?

The Associated Press reported last week that several American states are considering this outrageous question. A bill providing for tuition-free college education passed the Mississippi House (it failed in the Senate), and both Oregon and Tennessee are considering the feasibility of no-tuition policies for their community colleges.

The logic behind these efforts is well articulated by Oregon State Sen. Mark Hass: “I think everybody agrees that with a high school education by itself, there is no path to the middle class. …There is only one path, and it leads to poverty. And poverty is very expensive.”

Hass may overstate the case. Despite the dearth of good blue-collar jobs in our country — jobs that would firmly establish a worker in what’s left of the middle class and provide paid vacation, a pension and health insurance — a high school graduate might still cobble together enough work to keep himself more or less above the poverty line.”

But the second part of his argument holds true: Our failure to educate ourselves to our full capacities is expensive.

Hass refers to research from the Oregon University System that indicates that Oregonians with only a high school degree make less money and pay fewer taxes than those with college degrees.

They are also more likely to require food stamps and other sorts of public assistance.

Clearly, the closer we come to reaching our full educational capacity, as individuals and as a nation, the less likely we are to become criminals, prisoners, deadbeats and addicts. It’s hard to think of a social ill that wouldn’t be improved by more education.

Of course, there’s no such thing as “free” college. Taxpayers have to come up with the money.

Would our country be better off if all students had a genuine opportunity to push their educational capacities to the limit? Of course.

By the same token, would our nation be better off if everyone had access to effective health care? Or if we didn’t spew so much carbon into the atmosphere? Again, of course and of course.

These are long-term social benefits that ideology fools us into believing are unattainable. But versions of these goods and others have been achieved elsewhere, and they could be achieved in the United States, as well.